Your ReadingDebt is the set of books that you have promised yourself that you will read someday but haven't purchased or opened yet.

It may be preferable to keep your ReadingDeficit low and your ReadingDebt consequently higher. However, bibliophiles like myself can't help but accumulate extra books in the hope that one day they'll migrate to the ReadingDeficit and finally to the completed pile.

I have this (anti) pattern! My ReadingDebt is pretty large. I tend to buy books that I know I will someday want to read. For instance, I bought a Raymond Chandler collection years ago because (a) it was rather cheap and (b) there were four complete novels in it. I hung onto it for a couple of years and eventually read them.

I also find that I buy books, read the first few chapters and then decide to put it down and read it later.

My bookcases are full, but I'm purging them this weekend. Probably a good idea to recycle unread books.

At the risk of inventing a name for a problem that might not exist if you didn't name it(!), what might we call the set of [books] that you would add to your ReadingDebt if you knew they existed? Can we make distinctions between friends who add to one's ReadingDebt by recommendation, and companies who try to add to ones ReadingDeficit by selling you a book even though YouArentGonnaReadIt? -- MatthewAstley